I had lunch today with Toni Schneider. He used to work at Yahoo, and before that Oddpost. Now he's part of Matt Mullenwegg's company, whose products include Wordpress.com and Akismet, both of which I use and recommend. It was a good meeting and pretty ordinary (but interesting) until the end, when it got a bit heated. I had noticed that he was listed as a featured speaker on the Web 2.0 conference, and mentioned it as kind of a tease, but then it occurred to me, we're on different sides on something that I've been overlooking, but I guess I don't want to overlook it anymore. How can we be friends if he's friends with people who are selfishly trying to monetize our work, without giving anything back. I say "our" work, because Toni represents many thousands of WordPress users. There's an arrogance around Battelle's conference, they're the insiders and we're the poor schnooks whose work they monetize. I'm one of those people. Anyway, I think this is beginning of a valuable discussion. Perhaps we can help Battelle and O'Reilly straighten this out, if that's what they want. If they don't want to, then we shouldn't be supporting their conference.

As Lou Josephs points out, at some point, very quietly, Google started providing RSS 2.0 feeds for Blogger sites. They use Atom elements to provide capabilities not provided by core RSS elements. Very rational.

I'm still amazed that when Google's search engine finds something in an RSS 2.0 file, it says the format is unrecognized. If it's taking this long to do something intelligent with RSS, how long before they "recognize" OPML? The other search engines aren't any better, btw.

My Sprint Ambassador cell phone trial has expired (after less than two months) and I'm hooked, I love the BlueTooth EV-DO capability. They say it'll cost at least $50 per month to get it reactivated. Is that a reasonable price? Or, could I get it from my current cell phone service provider, Cingular?

Meanwhile the SanDisk MP3 player has arrived. Out of the box it needs a charge, which is not a good sign for attention to detail. Every iPod I've ever gotten (I think I'm on my fourth by now) has come with a full charge, ready to plug and play. So, I was going to take it with me on BART today for my lunch meeting at Yank Sing, but instead it will stay here in Berkeley and charge up, while the video iPod accompanies me.

When I got back, the unit was all charged and ready to go, but it didn't show up on my Mac desktop. The answer was in the FAQ, I needed to set the USB mode in the Settings menu on the device, and voila, there it is, ready to copy files onto it. It plays Quicktime video. Voice recorder, FM tuner. Nice.